Mixtape Collaboration

           Over past two weeks in my Writing for Digital Media class, we have been talking about collaboration. We are exploring how other people can bring value to a project and add to a digital narrative. With the theme of collaboration in mind, I chose the prompt “Make a Mixtape” from Austin Kelon’s book Steal like an Artist Journal. I use the music app, Spotify, every day and enjoy creating playlists. When I create my playlists, I often feel like I am missing something because I only know so many songs. So, I decided to complete Austin Kelon’s prompt with another person. I chose to have them consciously participate and for it to become a partnership. By having a partner in this project, we could discuss together songs to put on the mixtape, as opposed to randomly asking someone for a song suggestion. I ended up bringing my best friend, Emily, into to the project to help me pick a theme and select songs for the mixtape.

    After a discussion, we decided to make the mixtape about the seasons with side A devoted to winter and side B devoted to summer. Immediately after deciding on our theme, Emily came up with the first song for the winter side. She said, “The first thing I thought of for winter was that James Blunt song where he like sits naked on a glacier and lays out all of his possessions during the music video.” I laughed and said, “You mean ‘You’re Beautiful,’ but I thought you hated that song?” “I do, but it’s what I thought of,” she responded and with that we had our first song. For the next hour, we sat in our living room, played songs for each other, and decided what songs should go where on our mixtape.


    Throughout this collaboration, I was surprised the most by the amount of songs my best friend chose that I didn’t know already. As she searched through her Spotify account, she would name off bands and songs I never even heard of. When she played the songs for me, they were usually within my taste of music and this is where I found collaboration to be most helpful. The music only she knew added something to our mixtape that I wouldn’t have been able to do myself. By putting both our libraries of music together, we were able to expand the number of possible songs for the mixtape. The idea of what makes a song’s sound fit into winter or summer is subjective. Emily’s interpretation may be different than mine, and by blending our ideas together, we were able to create something better than what we could create apart.
    When we had all the songs on our mixtape set, it came time to give it an overall name. We drew inspiration from the second song on the mixtape, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. Emily looked up the lyrics because she remembered a line in the song that would fit as our title. She showed me the lyrics on her phone and her idea was perfect. In my Steal Like an Artist Journal, I wrote our title, “The Seasons of My Life,” across the top of the mixtape.  

P.S. To find our playlists, you can follow the embedded links or use the Spotify app to scan the images. 

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